Cloud wars: Google, Amazon and Microsoft battle to own the future of computing

Google is known in almost every country as the world’s dominant search engine, Amazon as the world’s biggest online retailer, and Microsoft as the computer software powerhouse behind Windows.

But the three companies are also locked in a battle to define the next revolution in computing, a gold rush that could become even more lucrative than the hundred-billion dollar operations they run today: the cloud.

Cloud computing lets companies or people essentially rent on-demand processing power, storage and software over the internet. Instead of buying expensive computer servers, memory and programs, companies can now hire them, tapping into the vast enormous data centres run by the likes of Google,...

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